A Season of Rendings

by Adam J Nicolai

  She drew a shuddering breath, trying to steady herself, and nodded. "If you go down that alley you'll see the manna I summoned this morning."

  The commander's eyes followed her gesture, but he plainly suspected a trap; he made no move that direction.

  "M'sai," she said. "There's also this." She opened her cupped hands, banishing the alley's shadows with clericlight.

  "All right," he snarled. "That's enough." The soldier with the delicate features dismounted and jerked her arms behind her back. His shackles snapped over her wrists like doors slamming shut, the final consequence of her choices. The other soldier, a burlier man who looked like he'd enjoyed one too many ales over the years, pulled a gag from his belt.

  "You don't have to do that," she said. "I promise you, I won't―"

  The words cut off as he yanked the dirty cloth into her mouth. It tasted like sweat and filth, stirred a lazy nausea in her stomach.

  "Damn right you won't," the commander said as the two secured Seth the same way. "I'm taking these two to Father Genneth. Tell the others to start burning."

  Burning? Lyseira mumbled a question, the words leaking out from her splayed lips with the drool down her chin, and received a cuff across the back of the head.

  "Shut up," Delicate said.

  "Is it the full burn?" Burly asked.

  "Full burn, like we discussed this morning. Flush the roaches out. Station Malak and Willred here at the alley—some of them may come here looking for her when it starts. Any who do are to be killed on sight.

  "You heard the captain this morning: it's time to take Red back."

  "About time." Burly punched his open palm. "Sehking nogs. Been waiting years for this."

  No. No, you can't do this. She tried again to protest and Delicate gave her a stinging open palm across the cheek that sent a spray of spittle from the corner of her mouth. "Do you know what 'shut up' means?" he asked.

  She didn't shut up. She raised her voice, shouted as best she could through the muddling interference of the gag. Run! Get out of here, everyone! It came out as gobbledygook, the ravings of a madwoman.

  "I said hush!" Delicate snarled. He pulled back for another strike—

  —and fell slack-jawed as a violet streak of lightning tore the sky in half.

  "What in Hel," the commander breathed.

  "Do you think―?" Burly started, but Seth cracked his face open with a headbutt before he could finish. As he staggered backward, clutching at his face and screaming, Delicate tore his own sword loose with a startled shout. Seth, still gagged with his wrists bound behind his back, delivered a sharp kick to the man's hands. The soldier howled as his sword went flying. A follow-up roundhouse to the head sent him sprawling to the ground.

  "Hey!" the commander roared, pulling his own weapon.

  Seth fell into a log roll toward Delicate's still body. He came up in a wary squat, his back to the man's waist, his eyes locked on the commander.

  "Down on the ground!" the commander shouted. "Face down, now!" The shout got the attention of the other soldiers farther down the street, who began to run that way.

  With an ominous click, Seth's shackles fell away. In his right hand, he held the key he'd just taken from Delicate's belt.

  The commander launched his horse into a charge at the same time that Burly, his face a bloody ruin, charged drunkenly into an attack at Seth's back. Lyseira tried to scream, but the gag mangled her warning into an incoherent wail.

  Seth still heard it. He darted sideways, beneath the flailing swing of Burly's sword behind him. As the momentum of the soldier's missed attack carried him forward, Seth cracked a kick into his back that sent him flying face-first into the commander's charging mount. Man and horse alike spilled to the street.

  Seth slipped behind her and deftly unlocked her shackles. She tore the gag from her mouth as soon as her first hand was loose—just as the soldiers from down the street closed with them, shouting and brandishing swords.

  She had acted out of love and out of hope. She had known shame and guilt and fear. But standing in that broken street, watching the Fatherlord's soldiers come to kill her and everyone she'd tried to help, she knew only fury. Her blood turned to fire, her hair lifting around her like a halo.

  God was with her, and He was roaring.

  As silent lightning shattered the sky into fragments of blue and green and orange, white fire erupted from her hands. It streaked into the charging soldiers and detonated, hurling them into walls and trash piles as they screamed. A second wave of soldiers followed that one, so she treated them to the same. Their formation shattered like gravel blasted by a lightning bolt.

  The raw brilliance of the two miracles ripped a sizzling scar across her sight which left her blind.

  "Everyone run!" she shouted into the blazing whiteness surrounding her. "They've come to kill you! Run!" Somewhere in the fog of flame, she heard Seth dispatching the commander, readying a horse.

  "Here." His hand gripped her arm, steered her toward safety. "Horse. Mount up."

  "I can't see."

  "I know. I'll steer. Up now."

  He guided her foot into the stirrup. As she climbed, he roared: "The Tribunal is coming! You have to get out of the city! Tell everyone! Run!"

  Then he was mounted in front of her, solid as a pillar of stone. Clinging to his back, she felt a warm wetness across the front of his shirt: blood.

  "Are you hurt?"

  "The commander got a hit in. It's nothing I can't―"

  She called the fire and closed his wounds. This time the roar of the flame didn't fade when the miracle finished; it filled her ears, blocked out his words and the whinnying of the horse with the steady, pounding rumble of a waterfall.

  She clung to his back, blind and deaf, as he kicked the animal into a gallop.

  v. Angbar

  "I think I broke my leg," he whimpered.

  Syntal hurried down the stairs of the Rising behind him, clutching her new wardbook close. "What happened?"

  "I fell. I was trying to push through, and I lost my balance―"

  "Push through?"

  "Yeah, I had to push! Didn't you feel―?"

  The main doors to the Hall slid open. The two guards Syn had chanted to sleep stood in the doorway. "Who in Hel―" one of them began, and she chanted them to sleep again.

  "Come on," she said as they crumpled back to the ground. "Can you walk?"

  Angbar took her offered hand and pulled himself to his feet. His right leg felt all right, but his left ignited with pain whenever he put any weight on it. "No," he winced after making this discovery. "Ah . . . no."

  "Can you just limp along back to Red? Lyseira can take care of you when she gets back. We just have to get there."

  There's no guarantee Lyseira will get back, he thought, but it was pointless to say it out loud. Syn was right; they couldn't stay here.

  He balanced on one foot, holding the other just above the ground and leaning heavily into Syntal's shoulder. "I don't know. I can try." Her support kept him on his feet, but it, too, was tremulous. Syntal had cast a number of her most taxing spells today. Her trembling muscles and the smear of dried blood on her upper lip betrayed the weight they'd already put on her. All the same, he couldn't walk without her support.

  They tested this arrangement in a series of awkward hops which took them back to the Hall's main door, where he had to get creative to work his way around the two sleeping guards. It was a slow process, but it got them outside—

  Where the sky thrashed with silent lightning.

  They both fell quiet, riveted to the sight. Now that he thought to look for it he again saw the world's colors deepening, as if a thin gauze had been lifted from his eyes. He felt the stone shivering beneath his boot, the very air turning crisper in his lungs. In seconds, every facet of the world around him transformed into something stark and beautiful, yet utterly familiar.

  A third Storm. He thought of the Fatherlord, speaking even then at the Dedication on the March,
and couldn't help a smile. I'll bet He's furious.

  Syntal saw his smile and returned it with one of her own—shy, but proud. "Come on," she said. "I want to just watch it, too, but we couldn't ask for a better distraction." She started walking, grunting against his weight on her shoulder.

  "Besides," she promised, "there'll be another."

  The broad boulevard was still empty, and no one saw them duck back into the winding side streets. As they drew farther, though, Angbar saw smoke rising from the direction of home. The wind in the alleys carried with it shouts, the pounding of feet.

  Blood-curdling shrieks.

  There's no reason to think that's coming from Red, he tried to rationalize at first. That's just my paranoia. A few minutes later, though, Syntal heard it too.

  "Gangs?" she murmured.

  "Probably. Hopefully they're not too close to home."

  Syn shook her head. "I can't wait to get out of this place."

  The comment tore at him. He, too, wanted to feel safe again—but the last place he'd truly felt that way had been at the Safehold, and they weren't going back there. At least here they were doing some good. The children's bright laughter, when he was lucky enough to elicit it, was proof of that. Besides, the gangs in Red weren't really that much of a threat to them. Seth had taken on Gial's group alone on their first night, and that was without bringing he and Syntal's chanting support—or Lyseira's Bindings, for that matter—to bear.

  Still, it common to hear the odd midnight scream, or even find a body in the streets come morning. Red had never been a place of safety—even after his best days caring for the kids during Lyseira's classes, he hadn't deluded himself about that.

  But something about this felt different.

  He sniffed, a hint of caustic smoke catching in his nostrils. "It is strange, though. Fire? Broad daylight? I mean, it sounds like a battlefield over there. Even the gangs have never―"

  The words died on his tongue as they rounded the last corner. The Church had set up a barricade of short crates braced with spears at the intersection just ahead. The spears faced inward—toward Red.

  A contingent of nearly a dozen soldiers manned the barricade, all with the scarlet tabards and God's Stars of the Church's guard. Several had crossbows set against the barricade, aiming down the street, which was already littered with bodies.

  Angbar's tongue cleaved to the roof of his mouth. A strangled wheeze came from somewhere deep in his chest. As he watched, rooted in place, a group of screaming peasants tore around the corner at the far end of the street, chased by a pair of mounted soldiers brandishing torches. As their eyes lit on the barricade, on the bodies scattered around the avenue, the runners' faces curdled with terror.

  The crossbowmen released, jerking half the runners off their feet in a hail of bolts. Some of the survivors turned and ran; others dropped, screaming and covering their heads, as their mounted pursuers caught up and finished them.

  "You!" one of the men at the barricade barked at Angbar. "Nog!"

  He didn't answer. He didn't think. The corner was right behind him. He turned to run, broken leg be damned—

  —and saw a burst of blood from his stomach, the tail of a crossbow bolt suddenly sprouting from his gut. He pitched forward, snapping the end off the quarrel as he crashed to the dirt, and felt a second one explode into his ribs.

  Chant, he thought, Chant, it's your only chance—but the Pulse was a thousand miles away, a distant promise veiled by an ocean of pain and panic. He could no sooner reach it than he could pluck a star from the sky.

  Syntal was chanting, though, screaming chants at their attackers, a whirlwind of flashing, brilliant missiles. Blood ran from her eyes even before the first bolt took her in the stomach, doubling her over and blasting the Slumber spell from her lips. The breath leaked from her mouth in spatters of wheezing blood as she sank to her knees, but still she chanted, launching into a long command that this time Angbar immediately recognized and knew was hopeless in the same thought:

  A Rising.

  There's no time for that.

  Screams from the far side of the barricade, the stink of ravenous flames.

  Syn, there's no time.

  Another bolt buried itself in her chest, inches from her heart. The chant cut off in a horrific choking sound.

  No time.

  No time at all.

  16

  i. Harth

  He woke to find the sky breaking.

  He thought he was dreaming, at first—just as he had as a child in Keldale, nearly ten years ago, when all the city had fallen silent and stared at the southern sky. The lightning was in the east this time, but somehow even more vibrant: every bolt a slash in the fabric of the sky, revealing the infinite depth and color looming just behind it. He stumbled to his window, enrapt, to watch.

  Then he realized he could do far more.

  Ascending was usually easy for him, no harder than throwing open a door in his mind. But this morning he found the door slow to respond, as though instead of opening into an empty room, he was trying to push into a space thronged with people. He kept at it, patient and insistent, as he kept his gaze riveted to the light show in the eastern sky. Then, finally, the door opened—and he gasped.

  With his naked eye, he'd been able to see the colors bleeding into his surroundings, but here, Ascended, everything was new. The Pulse didn't beat now so much as it thundered, taking hold of the universe's unveiled truths and scattering them like pebbles—pebbles which somehow reformed of their own design to make new objects and new truths that infused the air around him as though they had always been there. Then the Pulse shattered those truths again, and again, assailing him with revelations both unrecognizable and unfathomable. His inn room became a place of brilliant transformation, a local reflection of the metamorphosis underway throughout the world. The mortal part of his mind, the part still tethered to the flesh he called his body, wondered in awe what would happen if he tried to chant.

  When the Storm ended, so did the Pulse's constant evolution. When it resumed its ordinary magnificence—secrets bristling on every plane, the air shining with divinations—he Descended.

  Giving up that brilliance felt like dying. No, worse: it felt like dementia, like giving up consciousness and will itself. A storm of memories raged in the back of his thoughts, but he couldn't access them—he could only know that he'd had them once, and weep for their loss.

  Pulling himself together after witnessing such glory was a bit like recovering from a pinch of scab. For a few minutes, everything became wonderful, but the crash could kill him if he let it.

  He never had before. He didn't mean to now.

  So I'm not in the Pulse, soaring through the mysteries of the cosmos. I'm not in the street, either. He was in his room at the Damsel's Rest, where the beds were comfortable and the food affordable. It could be much worse for him—and had been, many times. Again, he channeled Retash. Get up, you wuss. You're better than this. Be a damn man.

  Once he'd finished with the chamber pot and started dressing, his mind had finally returned enough to think of the kids back home. Had the new Rending this morning scared them? Had Lorna been worried? None of them had been far from his mind over the winter, but thinking of them now twisted his heart with homesickness.

  Lorna wasn't his mother—he barely remembered that person, she'd left him in an alleyway at the age of three—but she may as well have been. She and Matthew had taken him in when he'd had no one. And though the orphanages in Keldale had spawned a lot of horror stories, Lorna's had never been like that. Somehow, she had always made everyone feel like they belonged. Like they were loved. It was loud and messy and crowded, but it would always be home.

  She'd be furious if she knew how I was paying for this place. He threw a glance at the bed, where he'd stashed eight crowns in a small cut underneath the mattress: the proceeds from several weeks of thievery. I thought you left that life behind, she'd say, her shoulders slumped and her eyes heavy. Oh, Harth.
You're better than that.

  No one got hurt, he argued in his head. I put them all to sleep first. And besides, it's not for me, it's for you. Once I get twenty crowns, I'm sending it all back to you. The money you spent on Helix and his oblivious friends. You need it, especially with Matthew gone. The winter must have been devastating for her: alone and poor, with a house full of children to feed and clothe.

  I don't want it. Not if you're getting it that way. That's what she would say if she knew, but it didn't matter—because she would never know.

  He sighed and finished dressing, his thoughts roaming back to Helix and the others. Had they gone through with their ridiculous plan to go to Tal'aden?

  Wait a minute. Suddenly, Syntal's uncharacteristic push to go to Tal'aden started making sense. There was something there, something you knew about and didn't share. A smile played at his lips. She was more devious than she looked. You devil. You should have told me.

  He wouldn't have risked it for Helix, or Lyseira—or even for Syntal herself. He still thought visiting Tal'aden had been a mad choice.

  But the Pulse was awe-inspiring. Every time he felt it he wanted to experience it forever. If he'd known Syn was after something that would result in a third Storm, well . . .

  Sometimes mad choices were the best kinds.

  A heavy air pervaded the common room, the natural product of the morning's Storm, but breakfast was no less delicious for it: a hash of potatoes, peppers, onions, and sausage, along with two glasses of fresh apple juice, for a shell and a half. He rounded it up to an even two shells. A generous tip, maybe, but the serving girl's shy smiles had earned it.

  That left a broken crown and a handful of heels in his coin purse. Added to the eight crowns in his room, he was nearly halfway there. He'd started hitting richer marks here in the city's north end, closer to Basica Majesta; with luck, he'd recover Lorna's full twenty in another week or two.

  He threw the serving girl a smile of his own and left through the front door, finally beginning to feel like himself again—then stopped, heart racing, as he saw the poster.